Guns of Mars 54
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 14.2
He’d slung dry canteens with pebbles in them from the horns of the saddles. He awoke to their rattle.
His eyes opened on children staring at him. Urchins with filthy faces and filthier hands, dressed in tatters and rags. He’d drawn his pistols without thinking and trained them into their startled faces. Behind them, older children were untying the tethers that held the heaps of pelts secured in bundles. Another stood holding the reins of his lead mount and petting its snout to keep it quiet.
“Hey,” he said.
The adolescents turned to regard him, or more accurately, the revolvers he aimed at them as he rose to his feet. They scattered, the whole lot of them, running out into the gray morning light.
After seeing to the thoats and some hurried ablutions of his own, the bounty man set out to find the old man. The geezer scurried up to him as he led the mounts onto a main thoroughfare.
“Can I help you be on your way?” the old man said. “I cannot stress enough the importance of a hasty leave-taking.”
“You can guide me to a trader where I can sell my wares.”
“Yes! I know just the place.”
“I thought you might.”
The bounty man followed the old man out into the city’s central market.
The broad avenue was coming to life as the day began. Fingers of milky dawn light touched the tops of the ruined towers. Miners gathered to march out to the digs, walking or riding in thoat-drawn carts. Merchants raised the awnings on market stalls to sell tools, grain, meat and bins of melons and tubers.
A tradesman had set up shop in the ground level of what was once a marvelous dwelling. Thoats were stalled in rooms walled with rose tinted marble. They watered from tubs cut from malachite, the gold fixtures long ago stripped from them. Piles of skins of various animals lay in stinking heaps waiting to be stretched and tanned by a work force of women and children who worked furiously under the direction of a shouting man.
“This is Thalex,’ the geezer said by way of introduction, bowing and gesturing toward the roaring merchant.
Thalex was a fleshy man, a roll of fat hanging over the top of his girdled waist was proof of his prosperity. Fat men were rare in a world where most only found enough sustenance to see them through another day. For all his supposed wealth, he was a grimy specimen in soiled leggings and torn tunic.
Waving away the old man’s introductions, the trader went right for the goods tethered down atop the thoats.
“Gold or goods?” he said, fingering the greasy end of an untreated hide.
“I need water for eight padans for me and two thoats,” the bounty man said. “And enough food for us. I also need a full weight of gunpowder and a bar of lead.”
“No gold then?” the trader said squinting.
“Nothing I can’t drink or eat or shoot.”
“What’s for trade here?”
“All but two thoats. I offer the mounts, their cargo, the saddles, tack, gear, and weapons.
“These animals. This gear. I know it. You stole it.”
“Is that a concern of yours?”
“Only if the ones you took it from might come looking.” The trader gave the bounty man a hard look.
“Not in this life,” the bounty man said with a shrug.
A deal was struck and the bounty man was off with his goods and thoats down the eastbound pass that lead from Yttrium out onto gray hills that stretched unbroken to the horizon.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
